1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to tissue repair and replacement. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to a surgical system for repairing a tissue defect and a method for utilizing the same.
2. Description of the Related Art
Damage to anatomical tissues, i.e. bone and cartilage, may result from trauma, aging or disease, for example. Such damage may result in pain and/or restricted mobility, which in turn may necessitate surgical intervention to repair the damaged tissues. However, some anatomical tissues may require lengthy periods of time to heal or may have limited capability to heal on their own.
Various techniques have been developed to repair tissue damage, such as procedures for joint arthroplasty procedures in which one or more of the articular surfaces of the joint are replaced. In other cases, where only a portion of a particular articular surface needs replacement, a patch or plug of synthetic cartilage and/or bone is implanted in a void created by excision of the damaged tissue. Still other methods, such as mosaicplasty and osteochondral autograft transfer, harvest viable natural cartilage from one area of the body and implant it at the site of the excised damaged tissue.
Where a small area of tissue is removed to repair a deflect or injury affecting only a portion of an articular surface, one potential method is to remove a cylinder of tissue large enough to encompass the defect, and then implant a pre-made prosthetic plug sized to fit the cylindrical void created by the resection. However, use of this method for elongate defects, such as hairline fractures or irregularly shaped diseased tissue profiles, may result in the removal of a large proportion of healthy tissue material. In order to reduce the removal of healthy tissue, smaller cylindrical excisions can be serially arranged along the extent of an elongate defect, and smaller cylindrical plugs can then be placed in a line along the resected area.